¡Uff, que calor!

I wandered in to do my session with 4A, the fourth year is the last year of obligatory secondary school. It was my last lesson with them before my contract ends at the end of May. They're a nice bunch but it's a big class and they tend towards noisy, no let's be honest, loud. I said hello and started whatever it was I was going to do but they weren't paying much attention - their energies were being taken up by an awful lot of fanning and expelling sufficient breath for top lips to oscillate. It's too hot, it's suffocating, we're going to die. The class teacher who makes sure that the noise doesn't turn into a riot, looked up from her computer. A brief conversation and she set the air conditioner going. My guess is that there are guidelines as to the temperature setting for the air-con and the youngsters wanted it lower. With a big grin on my face I set into one of those "When I was a lad air conditioners didn't exist, what a bunch of whiners you are etc".

It made me laugh, outside it was probably around 30ºC, not exactly roasting. It was warm but I was perfectly comfortable in my habitual boots, jeans and T shirt. Most of the pupils were in shorts.

in the staff room, after the ritual greeting, the first and main topic of conversation between any two or more teachers was the temperature. I was asked several times what I thought about the heat; unbearable eh? It must be worse for me coming from a country where polar bears and penguins roam. Lots of Spanish people aren't that hot on geography.

There's no doubt that it's warmed up in the last fortnight or so. It's still a long way from being hot but the summer sounds have begun. The spring flowers and green plants have taken on their summer shades of yellows and beige. The cigarras are singing in the garden but wood and metal aren't yet creaking as they expand or contract. The flies are out in annoying numbers. Everything is covered in a fine patina of dust and cars have a rugged he-man sort of dirty look. We haven't used any heating for ages, getting out of bed in the morning involves no more discomfort than creaking bones and heaving lungs. I've turned down the gas flame and upped the water flow on the water heater.

I've been asked three or four times whether I've been to the seaside - this is presumably because my arms, but only to the sleeve line, have got a bit of colour. It's because of the weeding I say. It has even been suggested to me that I may like to abandon long trousers for shorts.

It always amuses me. We Britons often complain about the weather - too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too windy, too still. Spaniards do exactly the same.

Invasive manoeuvres

You will remember we had trouble with a white cat that invaded our garden. The cat was nice enough but it didn't get on with our two. They hid inside, afraid to wander the garden. We were glad when the white cat disappeared.

There are colonies of wild and semi wild cats in Culebrón. Some probably get occasional food from humans but others live off what they hunt or can scavenge from the big communal bins. A young female tabby realised that the open door to our kitchen, at times, offered access to free food left over by our satiated cats. She was a persistent little cat, despite the water pistol, despite the occasional hosepipe assault, despite the shouts and clapping hands, she kept coming back. Our cats had no real problem with her, an occasional hissing but nothing profound. We are softies. We gave her food, always away from our house, but we did feed her. An easy if unreliable and sometimes contradictory feeding station. She was also human friendly, happy to be stroked.

A couple of weeks ago we decided to take her in. She would have to go to the vet and be checked. If she had something infectious then she was on her own but so long as she was basically fit the sofa and TV awaited alongside three square a day. Uncannily the cat failed to appear mewing on our window sill on the days when I was free to take her to the vet. Until this morning.

"What's her name?," they asked at the reception desk. "I didn't choose this," I replied quickly, "Gertrudis". A couple of animal keepers in the waiting room agreed that it was a nice name. When Cristina, the vet, beckoned us in to the surgery she called the cat by name with a smile on her lips. "Basically fit as a fiddle, obviously she's got worms and fleas but she's a sturdy little cat - nice temperament too". I arranged an appointment for the sterilization next week, paid the very reasonable flu jab and deparastiation (is that a word) charge and we came back home.

So we now look after three tabby cats difficult to tell apart at a glance - Beatriz, Teodoro and Gertrudis.

The tyranny of mealtimes

I used to listen to the Archers. For those of you that don't know the Archers is a long running British radio soap. The reason that I started to listen was that it used to start at 7.05pm. By then I was usually in the car and on the way to a meeting. And, that's because evening meetings in the UK invariably started at 7.30pm. I don't know whether that's still true. I can't really speak for UK habits nowadays but my guess is that things haven't changed. Likewise I would guess that the most popular slots for dinner reservations in restaurants will be 8pm or 8.30pm. Countries have timetables and most people know that Spain's is a little different.

Making a sweeping generalisation, as though it were the truth, most Spaniards leave the house with a minimal breakfast around 7.30 or 8am and get to work for the usual sort of times – 8,8.30 or 9am. Shops and lots of offices don't open till 10am. There's a mid morning break for something reasonably substantial - a sandwich, fruit, yogurt and drink sort of sized snack. Lunch is somewhere around 2pm or 3pm and I think that the majority of people still go home or to a restaurant and have a quite hefty midday meal. There's time to do a few of the household chores as well as to eat before going back for the second stint of three or four hours work starting at 4pm, maybe at 5pm. Dinner is usually eaten anywhere from 9pm to 11pm and lots of people manage to fit in some sort of snack between lunch and dinner - it's a good time for a tapa. Now that's like saying that everyone in the UK works 9 till 5. There are as many working patterns as there are businesses but the idea of a morning shift and an afternoon shift divided by lunch is a sound generalisation for a good percentage of the population.

So, if a Spaniard were making a dinner reservation 8pm just wouldn't do - most would be still at work and the majority of restaurants would only just be gearing up for the evening anyway. You would be perfectly safe with a 9.30pm reservation, though in some places and at some times of year it may be a little early. 10pm would be fine. Later wouldn't be odd especially in summer or when something was going on. Events, theatre and stuff generally kick off quite early, maybe at 7.30pm or 8pm which doesn't quite fit with the hypothesis that everyone's still at work but I've been to lots of plays that start at 10pm too. In summer, for instance in our local fiesta, many of the performances start at 11pm or midnight.

At work, at the job in Pinoso, they asked me if I fancied doing a couple of intensive 60 hour English courses in July. The truth is that I would rather read a book and lounge in the garden but the tax man sent me a hefty bill this year and I need the money so I said yes. I didn't need to guess much at the timetable. We'd have a slot in the morning and a slot in the afternoon. My arithmetic was up to it; four weeks working Monday to Friday at three hours a session, fifteen hours per week or sixty hours across the month doubled up for the two courses. Probably 9am to 12 noon and probably 4pm till 7pm or maybe an hour later. Either slot would be very normal, very standard.

Then we ran into a snag. My employers run a playscheme in the summer and a venue change meant that the morning slot wasn't open to us. Then the Spanish timetable dealt another blow. We couldn't possibly start before 4pm, any earlier and people wouldn't even have time for a quick lunch. And getting home for the next meal meant that going much beyond 9pm was pushing it a bit too. Again the basic arithmetic that Miss Bushell had driven into nearly 60 years ago came into play. Nine minus four is five and that's less than six and six hours is what you need for two courses of three hours a day. In order to get in the 120 hours for the two courses we'd need 24 sessions. The neat package of the same time slot for a nice self contained 60 hour course was out of the window. Other internal timetabling considerations made it even more complicated until eventually we ended up with a course running across six weeks with a variety of time slots.

I once shared a house with someone who stuck to a strict eight hours work, eight hours leisure, eight hours sleep policy. He was completely out of step with society. He'd have had a hard time of it in Spain.

En versión original

I'm going to talk about going to the cinema. Nearly all of this I've talked about before so, old, in the sense of long standing rather than aged, readers you can save yourself some time and stop now.

I've always liked going to the cinema. At the height of it I might go 130 times in a year. When we got to Spain that more or less stopped. Films here are almost universally dubbed into Spanish. There are a few cinemas where it's possible to see films in their original language with subtitles and even a few where you can use a pair of headphones to tune in to an original language version whilst the sound in the cinema is in Spanish. For the main part though, if you go to see a film in Spain it will have a Spanish soundtrack. When our Spanish was worse than it is now we were basically wasting time and money because we couldn't understand much of what was going on.

The dubbing causes problems at times where there is some interplay between actors of different nationalities. For instance I saw one the other day about looking for a lost city in the Amazonian Rainforest. The main protagonist was English and there were lots of references to the Royal Society and suchlike so, when the explorer bumps into some tribe in the middle of the jungle he doesn't say "Do you speak English?" or "Do you speak Spanish?" instead he says "Do you speak my language?" Although it jars a bit it usually works alright.

Obviously enough a large part of any actor's charm is his or her voice. Hearing someone well known speak with the wrong voice, or hearing some well known section from a film spoken with strange words, wrong phrasing and a different rhythm and tone can be most offputting. You get used to it though.

Years ago we went to see Slumdog Millionaire. I mentioned that we were about to go or that we had been to someone who had seen it in the UK. They said that they had had some difficulty in understanding the film themselves and that they thought it would be doubly hard in Spanish. In fact it was an easy film to understand. The difference of course was that, whilst in the original, the Indian actors were speaking in heavily accented English with Indian pronunciations and structures once it had been dubbed into Castilian Spanish it was pretty much grammatically correct.

The same tinkering with what is said happens on the telly. Lots of the programmes are broadcast in dual language. So English language programmes are available dubbed into Spanish for the bulk of the population. All we have to do is fiddle around with the menus a bit and hey presto we have the programme in the original English. This doesn't work so well for us if it turns out to be a French or German series! We watch The Big Bang Theory in English. I usually keep the subtitles on and the subs are, obviously enough, in Spanish. This is so I can understand what Bernadette is saying and so I can pick up on any good slang type expressions. The subtitles do not speak well for the Spanish people. Mention of Wendy's or Dairy Queen is translated into hamburger joint or restaurant or maybe McDonald's. It's not an advertising thing it's because the subtitlers are sure that Spaniards will not know what a Dairy Queen is. I don't know exactly what Captain Crunch is or Fig Newtons either but I can hazard a guess and using cereals and biscuits seems, to me, like some form of subtle elitism on behalf of the subtitlers. It can only help to maintain the parochial nature of Spanish society.

Our nearest cinemas are about 25km away. There are two multiscreen places there within a couple of hundred metres of each other. One is part of a big chain and the other is an independent set up. Both get new release films but the Yelmo, the chain, gets them without fail. The Cinesmax usually does. The independent fills the screens with what must be cheaper films - current films but with a longer run, foreign films and even second run films. It also offers a screen for the films with lesser distribution so, although it's not exactly art house, it does show stuff that's away from the mainstream. The staff are very nice to us nowadays, greeting us like old friends rather than simple customers. I think we've even been greeted by name a couple of times and we usually have a giggle about the correct pronunciation of the title of a film when it is given in English. When we walked out of something because it was so bad for instance they let us go to a completely different film.

We went to see a Finnish film earlier this week. A very strange film that I enjoyed a lot. One of its themes is about refugees with Syrians and Iraqis working their way through the Finnish asylum system. One of the obvious problems that the asylum seekers have is that they don't speak Finnish but, in the Spanish version, everyone speaks Spanish and the dubbers are left with a difficult problem. The actors do their job and demonstrate their confusion, lack of understanding of what's happening to them etc. but the soundtrack flows with perfectly ordinary language and perfectly ordered grammar. There is a complete mismatch between picture and sound. It reminded me a bit of that scene in Love Actually where Colin Firth has learned Portuguese in order to propose to a woman he met but was never able to talk to. In the English version, as he declaims his love in a crowded restaurant the subtitles show that his Portuguese isn't isn't at all bad despite his making grammatical slip after slip. Small things, not large enough to mask the meaning - inhabit instead of live, over emphatic adjectives and inverted phrases - but wrong enough to make it obvious to us that he is a tyro in the language. When she answers in English she says that she learned the language "Just in cases." The faltering language makes the scene. In the Spanish version that is not allowed to happen. In films dubbed into Spanish that is not allowed to happen.

Susi, Pete and Frank

Rather surprisingly, considering the recent history of Spain, we don't have a General Election on the horizon. Of course that's not strictly true. The Podemos people are pushing a parliamentary no confidence motion and if that were to prosper then, General Election here we come. But it won't.

We do, though, have a bit of a leadership battle in the PSOE, the Socialist Party. You will remember that we had a couple of General Elections in quick succession. The PP, the blues, the conservatives, won both times but they didn't get a majority. To be President /Prime Minister here you need a majority. The orange party, Ciudadanos, wobbled around a bit about who to back - given that there were two General Elections they had two real choices and they used them both. After the second and decisive election they sided with the blues and that's why we have the current Government. The PSOE, the reds, the socialists, were led by a bloke called Pedro Sánchez - he tried to form a government after the first election, the orange people were with him but the mauve people, Podemos, the bunch that don't wear ties, said the socialists were of the old order and not to be trusted. In the final analysis Pedro simply couldn't raise the support he needed. That's why we had the second General Election. Neither of the two biggest parties could muster enough support to form a government after the first.

After the second General Election Pedro, of the reds, was saying no -  no to backing the blues. If the reds didn't help the blues there would have to be a third General Election. Pedro was not for supporting the conservatives into government. There was a lot of toing and froing and eventually the socialists sorted it out by deposing their General Secretary, Pedro Sánchez. The day to day management of the socialist party was taken over by a caretaker committee.

We are now in the process of electing a new leader for the socialists. It's taken months and months. There are three candidates, the deposed Pedro Sánchez, an old hand in the party from the Basque Country called Patxi López and the President of Andalucia called Susana Díaz. Andalucia is the strongest stronghold of the socialists. Susana is the hot favourite with the backing of nearly all the party heavyweights. Personally, without much to go on except what I see of her on the telly or hear on the radio, I don't care for her. She seems a bit stern, a bit ready to get snappy for a politician, she doesn't seem to want to talk policy and she seems a bit sure of herself.

We've just had the first stage, the bit where the candidates have to garner enough support from the party faithful to be able to stand. Unless they get a specific percentage of party member's votes they cannot run for party leader - the idea, I suppose, being to stop joke candidates. Susana expected to be miles ahead in these "avales," endorsements, but she was only a few thousand votes in front of Pedro. Patxi was miles behind. What's more Susana picked up most of her votes from her home ground. She was beaten into second in lots of important areas of the country.

Obviously enough the three candidates are travelling around, on the stump, trying to rally support for their campaigns. It struck me that they may be somewhere local where I could go and see them so I put a search clue into Google to check their public appearances. At the top of the appropriate Google page when I searched on Pedro there was his timetable. It was the same for Patxi but the same search clue with only the name changed turned up nothing for Susana Díaz. Indeed having gone through four pages of results I still don't know where she's appearing. There are just news stories, her Twitter account and the Facebook page. Without delving too deeply I also noticed that on her Facebook page quite a few of the comments on show were a bit negative - your campaign is very 1970s, you need to talk specific policy rather than bland platitudes. That sort of thing. On the other hand both the Patxi and Pedro pages seem, with the same cursory look, to be much more positive about them though lots were telling Patxi to throw his lot in with Pedro.

I never back winners at elections, or very rarely, but I think it would cheer me up if Pedro Sánchez were re-elected. I didn't like the way he was shifted to one side for sticking to his principles and maintaining that socialist voters would not want to be the means by which a conservative government was put in power.

Right, whilst I'm thinking politics good luck to Macron and I'd better have a look at some of the UK websites to see who my choices are in the UK General Election. I've just realised that, presuming the Liberals or LibDems still exist, I don't even know the name of their party leader. I do know the other two. Not that it matters, I vote in Huntingdon and we know how we vote there.

Too much of a good thing

When I turned up for work this morning there was nobody there. The school was closed. Nobody bothered to tell me but it gave me the surprise bonus of being able to get to the Wine Horse Festival, Caballos del Vino, in Caravaca de la Cruz. There are all sorts of Fiestas but if we agree that a Fiesta is some sort of street based celebration open to the general public then I have been to a lot of fiesta type events recently. More specifically in the last week or so. A bit back there was Easter where we saw various processions in Pinoso, Tobarra and in Murcia. Then we went to the Moors and Christians in Banyeres de Mariola, the Romeria to San Pancracio in Sax and more Moors and Christians in Onil.

Easter in Spain I described a few posts ago so I'll skip straight to Moors and Christians which is loosely based on the triumph of the Christians over the North African invaders/rulers. In most places, as the name suggests, there are two main bands; The Moors, the North Africans, and the Christians, the eventually successful Spaniards. Generally the Moors get the better costumes. Sometimes there are Smugglers and sometimes Students. I don't know why and I'm too lazy to find out. Moors and Christians vary a lot. Sometimes there are big floats and lots of camels and horses. In other places the various troops march shoulder to shoulder keeping strict time to the music. We've seen one, I forget where, where the costumes included 18th Century soldiers uniform for lots of the participating groups. In the two and a half I've seen in the last few days the various groups haven't been particularly marshall. Some of them have vaguely marched, kept in step, but many more have simply gone for a stroll with a drink, usually a spirit and mixer, in hand. The strollers have been supported by members of the same group firing off arquebuses - those old fashioned blunderbuss type guns.

The Wine Horses is tied in to the Moors and Christians in a way. The usual story is that when the Castle of Caravaca de la Cruz was besieged by the Moors, in around 1250, the defenders ran out of water when their cisterns were exhausted. A group of Knights Templar loaded up some fast horses with wine skins and sped into the castle taking the besiegers by surprise and relieving the defender's thirsts. There are lots of events to make up the festival but the biggest one, up for World Heritage status, is a vague re-enactment of the Templar charge with four blokes, all men as I could see, running alongside an impeccably turned out horse wearing a fancy decorated coat, taking turns to do timed runs up the approach ramp to the castle. There are thousands, and I mean thousands of people on the approach ramp and lots of them have been drinking for a long time by the time the horses start to run. The crowd parts to let the horses through, well that's the idea any way. One bloke hauled me out of the way as I tried, vainly, to get a photo that wasn't too blurred and so badly framed as to be useless. He was quite cross with me. "It might have run you down," he kept saying to the degree that, eventually, I pointed out that it hadn't though. People bumping into me as they fled the horses made it difficult enough to take snaps without somebody saving me as well!

I have to say that the one I probably liked best though was the Romeria. This is the one where some statue of a Saint or a Virgin gets taken from one church to another little church. Sometimes the statues go in carts but usually they go on the backs of the faithful. The last couple we've been to have involved the carrying part followed by a Catholic mass but most people seem to just take it as an opportunity to go for a picnic in the countryside. Lots and lots, and I mean lots, wandering along dusty tracks hauling cool boxes and picnic tables just seems so Spanish and a great way to pass a day.

With a bit of luck though we won't have the opportunity to get to any more fiestas in the next couple of weeks. You can have too much of a good thing.

Impossible is nothing - Just do it

I realised this morning that I don't own any sports clothes. No Lycra (with my gut?), no trackies or even trainers. I do probably have some trainers and maybe some mountain man trousers somewhere but I haven't worn them for a while. This morning I was wearing boots, jeans and a jumper. I was the only person who didn't have lots of brand names as part of their clothing.

I'd signed up to do a bungee jump. Don't fret, I didn't actually do it. The event was advertised as puenting and, when I got there, I decided that what we were down to do was technically a pendulum jump rather than a bungee jump. The difference, I think, and don't quote me, is that on a bungee the elastic rope is fastened on the same side of the bridge as you jump from. The elastic stretches until it stops you and then catapults you back upwards. With a pendulum jump the cord is tied to the other side of the bridge from the side where you jump so there is a movement downwards but also laterally back underneath the bridge. When I was checking what damage jumping can do to a body as old as mine it was the bungee that offered possible eye and back damage.

Now I've never been much of a sports person. I don't like watching sport and I didn't like doing it. I've never been tempted to run, go to the gym, cycle, swim or hill-walk without reason or coercion. At school I was forced to do all sorts of dreadful, traditional, sporting things and later, when I was young and foolish, I tried some things I thought might be a bit more interesting - canoeing, sailing, pot holing, climbing and parachuting for instance. But I decided that I couldn't see the fun in going backwards on your elbows in a narrow tunnel as a farting someone kicked you in the face, trying to get back into the cockpit from being encased in the prow of an upturned boat as it bounced against WWII concrete defences or having your shoulders half wrenched out of their sockets. I chose other drier, ground-based and less malodorous hobbies.

For some reason though I've wondered off and on about doing a bungee jump. So when the local town hall put it on as part of their week of sporty activities I signed up. The person I gave my 30€ to (one jump 20€ two jumps 30€) didn't have any details. No information about anything. No little fact sheet - remember to wear sensible shoes and take a packed lunch - no safety guidance - don't do this if you weigh under 40kg or if you have a heart condition. Nothing. Well I did know where to go to catch the bus and the area we were going to - the Fuensanta reservoir near Yeste which turned out to be basically correct and specifically from la Vicaría bridge. I nearly cried off several times before today but I didn't have a contact number or an email address or anything. So I got up for the 7.30 start this morning probably to tell them I wasn't going to jump. Apparently 20 people had signed up but 11 had cried off (they must have just phoned the town hall I suppose) so we were reduced to a select band of young people and me who fittted nicely into the town hall minibus and a private car. I said to the organiser, right from the start, that I was too old and too scared to jump - not necessarily in that order The day looked hopeful though with sun drinking up the morning mist. I thought I could take some snaps so I decided to go to the bridge at least. The snaps are all blurred and badly framed.

The location was lovely. Albacete province looked splendid. I think I'd expected some sort of jumping centre but there was just the bridge. I looked over the side of the bridge and said that it was definite. There was no way I was going to purposefully throw myself into the void. To be honest when they started to jump it didn't look particularly strenuous. The only bit that looked hard was finding the courage to get onto the wrong side of the bridge fence and leap. Some people didn't do as they were told and didn't push off hard enough from the side but the only consequence seemed to be that the chief of the four person team intoned something like "¡hostias!" or "¡uff, los huevos!" as the cord tautened up. The jumpers might go "uff" too but they still got the ride and everyone walked back up the hill grinning. I vaguely wondered about doing it - I was there, I'd paid, I was pretty sure I'd survive even if I were to be one of the "uffers". It was a very vague thought though. My main reason for not doing it was that I lacked the courage to climb that fence, I'm not trying to pretend anything else but nearly as important was that I didn't really want to in just the same way as I have never wanted to do a Fun Run despite the obvious enjoyment that so many people get from it.

Public reading

I've mentioned Azorín, the writer born in Monóvar a few kilometres from Pinoso, before. There's a lot going on about him because it's the 50th anniversary of his death. A while ago I went on a walk around Yecla based on one of his books and today I went to a public reading of another of his works. It wasn't something I'd planned to do but when I booked up for another Azorín event the woman on the desk persuaded me to sign on for this one too.

If I've mentioned Azorín a couple of times I have mentioned my terror at speaking Spanish hundreds of times. Terror is definitely the right word. In fact my Spanish nowadays isn't too bad and, under certain circumstances, I talk without too much effort or I laugh off my mistakes. One of the worst situations though is when I participate in something that isn't really designed for someone with defficient Spanish. Go and stand in the crowd to watch a procession and nobody is surprised that there is a foreigner there taking snaps. Go to a concert and it's the same. But, if you go to a poetry reading or a political rally then, obviously, if you're there you must be able to speak Spanish; if not why are you there and not curled up safe on your sofa watching the BBC?

It's worse if Maggie isn't there for two reasons. The first is that if we are spoken to she is much, much braver than me and she does the speaking. All I have to do is make gutteral interjections or laugh at the appropriate time. The second is that it means I'm alone with nobody to talk to about what's happening or why.

So I turn up at the appointed time for the public reading of Las confesiones de un pequeño filósofo. The reading was going to be in the street outside the Azorín museum but the weather has been miserable for the last two or three days (probably because it's a bank holiday weekend) so the event was moved inside. I was cold sweat anxious in that irrational way that I have when I may be called upon to answer questions in Spanish. It was fine though, all I had to do was say hello and then I was able to skulk against the wall. The organisers had a list of names and just before everything got under way they asked me if I was Chris Thompson. They asked me first, they knew. My tiny joke about me looking English went down well. A few minutes later they asked me if I would like to be the first to read. It wasn't a public reading in the sense of someone with nice intonation and a good knowledge of the novel reading selected passages; it was the public taking turns to read some of the book! At least I understood the question enough to be forceful, definite, resolute and clear in saying no.

The reading was interesting enough. I didn't know the book but, after hearing the early chapters, I thought I might give it a go. Azorín has two modes - in one he gets all philosophical and talks about writers and political theories unknown to me and in the other he writes descriptions. I don't care at all for the philosophical stuff but the descriptions are often splendid.

And something else...

For years I didn't own a power drill. I made do with a little hand held job, in fact I often said that I preferred the manual ones.

I forget now how it started but, for years, I have been doing online surveys. Sometimes they ask me reasonably sensible things like who I might vote for or how I keep up with news and current affairs. Usually though they ask me annoyingly written and stupid questions about whether I agree more with the statement that a) my bank is friendly, honest and innovative or b) that my bank is chummy, trustworthy and forward thinking. There's no space to say that all banks are equally soulless. money grabbing and intrinsically corrupt. The survey people give me points for doing each survey and I can change the points for things in an online catalogue. The first time I used the points to send pigs to Nicaragua but somewhere along the way I used others to get a power drill. I now know that power drills are better than hand drills.

The other day I was asked to do a survey about sobrasada. I eat sobrasada from time to time. I usually eat it spread on bread or maybe as the spread in a sandwich. I've always presumed that sobrasada was the dripping that comes from making chorizo, the rough cut pork sausage flavoured with paprika type pepper. I thought of it as being a Spanish version of the bread and drip that I used to eat as a lad. I assumed the Spanish stuff was the reddy brown colour because the dripping came from the paprika coloured meat and that the thicker consistency was because it contained strands of cooked pork flesh.

Anyway this survey asked me tens and tens of questions about sobrasada. They asked me whether I preferred the stuff that comes in tubs or the variety that came in a skin. They asked whether the keeping qualities of it were important and whether I preferred the cheaper stuff or the stuff that is denominación de origen; D.O. is used a lot in Spain to mark out more traditional products prepared in specific ways. D.O. ham for instance generally means that the ham comes from a certain breed of free range pig that feeds on acorns. D.O. wines contain particular grape varieties which are grown, harvested and matured in specific ways. Suddenly, I realised there was a whole back story to sobrasada.

It turns out that the pukka stuff comes from Mallorca and Ibiza in the Balearic Islands though Cataluña and Valencia have their own versions. Sobrasada is a sausage made from pork loin and bacon meat minced and mixed with paprika, salt and black pepper. There are versions with and without cayenne pepper which are labelled as either sweet or spicy. The mixture is not cooked, it is stuffed into a pork intestine and hung from a pole for several weeks until it is cured. For the spicier version the ends of the sausage are tied off with either red or red and white string to differentiate it from the milder version.

Apparently the chemistry that dehydrates the meat is favoured by the weather typical of the late Balearic island autumn, the time when pigs are traditionally sacrificed, with high humidity and mild temperatures. I'm sure that in the factories where they churn out tons of cheap non traditional sobrasada from old scrag ends - the stuff I usually eat – those conditions can be easily recreated.

There are lots of variations in the way that the real McCoy sobrasada is finally presented to the consumer. Sometimes it is removed from the skins and put into tubs (which stack nicely on supermarket shelves) at other times it is presented in thin sausages which are apparently called longaniza (the longanizas we have in Pinoso are a very different type of sausage). The stuff that I thought of as being traditional sobrasada is called semirrizada and that is presented as a sort of haggis shaped and sized sausage from which you scoop the fatty spread.

I'm sure you're not too interested in sobrasada. I'm not. In fact I'm slightly less interested since I learned that it's basically rotted meat. What did interest me though was that it was just yet another little thing that I didn't know about Spain. About something that is so commonplace that a supermarket chain wanted to know my opinions on it.

Looking for an epiphany

We've been to see a few Easter parades these last few days. When I was a schoolboy Mr Kemp and Mr Edwards, my Junior and Secondary school headteachers, were keen that I was given a good Christian Education. Whether I asked for it or not they made sure that I got it. Although I haven't really looked at a Bible or happily gone inside a church for well over forty years I still remember the basics of, for instance, the Christmas and Easter stories. At times it's not enough. So when I saw a float in a parade with the title of Aparicion de los Discípulos de Emaus or The Appearance to the Disciples at Emmaus it meant nothing to me. Fortunately other teachers tried hard to persuade me that finding things out and knowing how to find things out was easily as important as actually knowing things. It's much easier now than it used to be. Google knew. Emmaus or Emaus is one of those early Resurrection sightings.

In the same way that I have a well grounded but essentially partial grasp of Christian lore I have a reasonably good handle on Spain. I know a bit of history, a bit of culture, some politics and more. I keep trying to add to my knowledge. My sieve like brain is a perfidious ally in this attempt to learn and those funny foreign names don't help either but sheer persistence has worked for me in the past and I see no reason why it isn't a workable plan for, at least, the near future.

The last Easter float had passed us by. As we walked away the chair hire companies were loading their plastic seats into the back of myriad vans and the road sweeping machines were pirouetting around the streets which moments before had buzzed with spectators. As we neared our parked car we saw that there was something going on in the park, el Malecón, by the river. We've seen fairs and markets there before so we went for a nosey.

There were a bunch of temporary restaurants. They were busy. Most were called Peña this and that. Now peña is probably a word that I don't understand. Or maybe it's a word I understand perfectly. It seems to be a multi-use word - all peña usually means is that it's a group of like minded souls - Peña Madrileña for Real Madrid fans. It seems too that peñas can either be very open groups or quite closed groups. I've heard peña used to describe the garage hired by a bunch of mates during a town carnival to drink beer and hang around in. Often, within fiestas, there are peñas which are set up by associations of one kind or another. Your neighbourhood may be going to do some things in a town fête so the neighbourhood sets up a temporary HQ in an unrented shop. They call it a peña and it becomes a sort of social centre for anybody who has affiliations to that neighbourhood. Some peñas seem to be more permanent than others.

Anyway, so we've diverted to have a look in the park and we find all these restaurants and they are all called Peña this and that. We have no idea whether they are something to do with the Spring Festival, which always follows on from Easter in Murcia, or whether they are tied in to the Holy Week celebrations. We have no idea but hundreds and hundreds of people do, they are having their lunch there. Some of the peñas have price lists, most are completely full. We don't know if it's a walk in proposition, whether we need a reservation or if it's a members only deal. It doesn't matter. It's not as though we want to eat. We've already eaten in a bar in town. The reason we are interested is simply because we don't know what's going on. We are quietly and individually distressed. It's discomforting simply because we don't understand. It's another Emmaus moment.

In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it

We went into Pinoso on Wednesday to see the Procession of the imprisoned Jesus. He was escorted by the Roman Century and two of the be-hooded brotherhoods plus a couple of groups dedicated to different incarnations of the Virgin. To be honest I have no idea what was actually happening despite having seen this, or processions very similar to it, tens of times in our time here. In fact a British couple newly arrived in Pinoso were asking Maggie which of the long Good Friday programme in Pinoso were the ones not to miss and, when it came down to it, we were guessing.

One of the events IN CAPITALS for the Good Friday programme for Pinoso is the encounter between The Verónica and Our Father Jesús. Google tells me that The Verónica, according to the Christian tradition, was the woman who, during the Viacrucis, handed Jesus a cloth to wipe away his sweat and blood, a cloth on which his face was miraculously imprinted. Then I had to Google Viacrucis. It seems to be Jesus's journey from Palm Sunday to the tomb via crucifixion, which Wikipedia tells me is interpreted as the Stations of the Cross in English. I'm sure that the Spanish interpretation is Jesus dragging his cross up to Golgotha.

The point is that I have been a spectator at several of the events that mark Holy Week all over Spain but I don't really know what is happening or why. People often think of Spain as being a very religious, read Catholic, country. I don't think that's really true any longer. I think it is true to say that there are still a lot of fervent Catholics in Spain but they tend to be from the older generation. What there is a lot of in Spain is tradition that is based on Catholic iconography and dogma. So carved wooden saints or Virgin Mary statues turn up time and time again in various sorts of ceremonies. Priests bless animals and police cars, Baptisms and communions are a societal rite of passage and an excuse for a meal. Spain is a country with lots and lots of traditions and because, in the past, those traditions were linked to the Catholic Church the tradition still looks like and is loaded with Catholic symbolism and ritual.

Last night as the wooden figures were paraded around Pinoso amidst an enormous crowd everything suddenly went quiet, The procession halted and somebody, somewhere in the distance, sang a saeta, the traditional style of song only sung at Eastertide. I have no idea how all those people knew to stop, maybe it was preplanned, maybe the people who control each group are wired into some sophisticated communication system but everybody stopped. Even the gum chewing lads with the funny haircuts and the noisy children sitting in the gutter knew to shut up while the song lasted. When it was done, the crowd applauded loud and long. Very Christian and absolutely nothing to do with religion for the majority of the crowd.

Easter has other traditions. aside from the processions. A mass exodus from the big cities to the coast and lots of road deaths is one but there are also traditions around food just as there are in the UK. Maggie always bemoans the shortage of hot cross buns and chocolate eggs in Spain. Traditional Easter food includes torrijas, which takes all sorts of shapes and flavours, but are basically fried, sweetened, egg soaked pieces of bread. The mona de pascua is typical of this area - it's a sort of sweetened bready cake with a hard boiled egg in the middle. And, truth be told, chocolate Easter eggs are pretty common nowadays alongside gold foil wrapped Lindt Easter bunnies.

We were in Santa Pola for our first Easter in Spain. For us Easter was the British long weekend starting on Good Friday and ending on Easter Monday which is nothing like the timetable in Spain. One night I was getting really angry. There were obviously a couple of lads on their way to Boys Brigade band practice who were pounding their drums outside our window. I couldn't stand it any more. I went on to the balcony to tell them to shut up and found myself staring at a religious float being wheeled through the streets accompanied by people who looked like Klu Klux Klan members beating muffled drums. For those of you who know just as much about Holy Week, Semana Santa, now as I did then here is my brief guide to the Spanish Easter. A disclaimer. There are as many Easter traditions as there are towns in Spain so this is a very generalised view.

The first event is usually Palm Sunday, Domingo de Ramos, which can vary from huge processions, as in Elche, with lots of participants carrying palm fronds some of them woven into the most intricate designs imaginable, through to tiny processions with a small band of people waving any old greenery that they have found somewhere alongside the way following the local priest to or from the church up in Salamanca.

From Holy Monday on there are processions after processions in nearly every town or city of Spain through to the joyous celebrations of Easter Sunday. Semana Santa is everywhere but it's especially enormous down in Andalucia, especially in Seville and Malaga. All week long there are processions of penitents dressed in long cloaks with tall pointed hat and hood combinations with eye slits. They are usually called capuchas though there are several local names. The penitents are usually accompanied by eerie music based on drum beats and shrill horn blasts. The penitentes encapuchados (hooded penitents) or Nazarenos (Nazarenes) belong to a cofradía or hermandad - a brotherhood - usually associated with a particular church or cult. Each brotherhood has a distinctive design to the cloak and hood. As well as the brotherhoods there are often other groups with affiliations to a particular cult and or effigy. Women wearing the long lacy mantillas supported by a peineta, usually all in black, Roman soldiers with clinking armour and a whole range of other styles of uniform are common.

The penitents and sometimes the other groupings, accompany a paso or trono (tableau or float) nearly all of which have some reference to the Easter passion: Jesus on the cross, The Last Supper, some part of the Easter story featuring one of the Apostles - for instance Peter and a cockerel. The pasos vary in size, some are on wheels but the most impressive ones weigh a couple of tons and are carried by men (and nowadays women) four or five abreast. The crowd applaud the management of some of the bigger floats, often ablaze with chandelier style lanterns, and even for non believers the intricate design, the effort that goes into their preparation and the sheer size of the tableau is something to behold.

The slow and sometimes, literally, painful progress of the tronos is regulated by el capataz, the boss, who has to look after the team of bearers and make sure that the tableau avoid the overhanging balconies, negotiate the right angle turns and arrive safely to their destination. Along the way as the tronos stop, that's the time that the balcony based singers take their opportunity to sing the saetas. Usually the different brotherhoods take the lead in one of the processions sometime during Holy Week but they often process several times. The processions can be at any time of day and towards the end of the week there are more daytime events. The majority though start in the early evening, around eight or nine, and often go on well into the next morning. Usually all the brotherhoods of a city or town are on the move on Maundy Thursday as the day becomes Good Friday. Silent processions with towns blacked out for a short while around midnight are common. Seeing bands of hooded figures carrying carved statues on their back in the pitch dark is something to stir the spirit. Very eerie.

Some processions are much more serious than others, more religious. For instance in Pinoso and around the corner in Murcia the penitents often carry bags of sweets that they dole out to the outstretched hands of children. On the other hand, while I was getting a coffee in a bar on Wednesday, everyone stopped to watch the television as engineer soldiers (los gastadores) of the Spanish Foreign Legion changed guard on the Cristo de Mena, a carved wooden statue famous in Malaga. Imagine the precision of the changing of the guard outside Buckingham Palace, by soldiers with spades across their back, to stand silent and motionless to guard a wooden religious statue. Bizarre. When we lived in Cartagena the precision of the penitents  as they marched was remarkable. We have seen people denied a place in the procession because their gloves were not the correct shade of white or because the would be penitent had painted toenails poking from their sandals. On the other hand one of the tronos in Cartagena is a serving navy sailor, Saint Peter the fisherman. He is granted shore leave but ends up confined to barracks for another year when he returns drunk after meeting with his apostle colleagues in the wee small hours of the morning. The drunken return of Saint Peter involves the float bearers dipping and lifting the heavy tableau in unison. In Hellín people wander around the streets drumming with no particular organisation or purpose that I could see and drumming is big all over Castilla la Mancha. Watching the TV news the breadth of costumes and traditions is breathtaking.

Spain is just about as Spanish as Spain gets at Eastertide